Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!news.swapon.de!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Mark Carroll Newsgroups: comp.programming Subject: Re: is it better to learn a couple of platforms/technologies or just one? Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2015 13:47:02 +0000 Organization: none Lines: 42 Message-ID: <87sidsiy3t.fsf@ixod.org> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="1b3e5cba9e4d07a53741e6f3d1717925"; logging-data="9574"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18J6MpOI85g5Fz+Y/Shjawo" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:OW6BnUdN566w5Lk6tUsckm/VnCk= sha1:QLCeMbh97C4okXL5ERDY3OdOgFo= Xref: csiph.com comp.programming:5266 Richard Heathfield writes: (snip) > The way the world *should* work is that companies hire bright people, > regardless of whether they know CORBA or Zend or Bogalog or whatever the > technology is. > > Does this ever happen? I don't know, but somehow I doubt it. It /does/, but it's uncommon. For instance, when my employer went out of business during the credit crisis, I got back into mainstream full-stack stuff -- PL/pgSQL, Hibernate, Struts, Spring, Lucene, JavaScript etc. -- through being hired by such a company. You have to look for ones who hire a lot of new graduates from good universities and expect them to be able to work on the whole codebase (so they expect one to learn on the job). As a professional used to managing teams on multiple projects at once, this new job at a place used to hiring new graduates was a pain from the point of view of now just being junior and working on only one project while managed by people with more years in that company but rather less experience overall than I -- it was more a word of mouth thing that colleagues learned I could actually help with shell scripting, LaTeX, image transformation, etc. too outside the role I officially had -- but it was a nice holiday from having a more stressful position and really boosted my resume with the latest buzzword technologies for the next round of job applications. Unfortunately, it takes a good programmer to know one, and the good programmers are mostly busy doing work they're needed for instead of filtering through job applicants. You're right: there's an issue. And, related to my other post in this thread, it now occurs to me that a mix of, say, Standard ML and Java will help me when I have to use Scala, which I have seen just a few paid positions for. For this kind of thing, when I apply for a job using a language I've not used before, I normally offer to supply code samples, and if they'd like to specify a small problem for me to work on and provide a solution in that language before they agree to interview me, then for some of them that's just fine and actually rather appreciated (some pick Project Euler problems). Also, there are other large employers who have their own in-house stuff like InterSystems Caché where they don't really expect to hire people who already know MUMPS or whatever. -- Mark